After the girl had gone, Emily took the letter and went upstairs to the back sitting room. She did not allow the turmoil within her to disturb her dignity or quicken her pace. She found her mother seated in a rocking chair and musing over a passage from the Bible that lay open on her lap. "Good morning, my child," said Mrs. Barr, as her daughter entered. "You must have made short work of breakfast. Are you late?" "No, mother, I’ve brought you a letter I opened by mistake. It is directed to Janet." "Oh, well, just lick it together again," she said, with arid humor, "and lay it beside Janet’s plate. She’ll never know the difference. You know Janet." Mrs. Barr’s levity appeared to distress Emily. "That’s not what’s troubling me, mother. I—" She hesitated and held out the envelope with a good imitation of helplessness. Her mother stopped rocking and looked in some astonishment from Emily to the letter. Mrs. Barr was a tall, well-set woman, whose rigid bearing was but little softened by her refined surroundings. She was neither thin nor fleshy; there was something solid and conservative about her that suggested the Chinese wall. Solidity was her pronounced characteristic, solidity of soul no less than solidity of body. Her face was hard; it was full of lines that looked like razor edges drawn in gall. Mrs. Barr had been beautiful in her youth and might still have been so had she not sacrificed everything—everything but her love of comfort—to a greed for power. Experience had taught her that a fit of sickness was a right royal prop to domestic tyranny. Thus she had cultivated ill-health until nothing saved her from being a professional invalid but her naturally strong constitution and an inherited playfulness which still occasionally emerged between long fits of bad temper. She was the president of the King’s Daughters’ Society in a local Presbyterian church, and, as she was preparing for a meeting that day, she cut Emily short. "Well, Emily, what do you want me to do?" she said, less amiably than before. "I’ll explain it to Janet if you like." "You don’t understand, mother. I not only opened the letter, I read part of it before I realized my mistake." "That’s not a crime, dear." "No—But what I read amazed me. It seemed all of a piece with Janet’s strange behavior of late." "Indeed? Who is the letter from?" Emily flushed slightly. "Mother, I told you I didn’t read as far as that. I couldn’t help seeing the first line, however. And that confirmed the suspicion we have both had, that Janet has been falling under bad influences." "Emily, is some man corrupting her?" "It looks like a woman’s hand to me. What do you think?" Emily gave the letter to her mother, who scrutinized the handwriting for a moment. "Well," she said at length, "there can be no harm in your repeating to me what you inadvertently saw."